I tried out Field Runners on my friend’s iPhone the other day and while I liked the game, I can’t help but feel that it would have played better with a stylus.

At this day and age, you can trust that someone will come up with that, but on the Nintendo DS. THQ’s Desktop Tower Defense may look cheap (but hey, you can customize the bitmap graphics pixel by pixel), but it plays like its more heralded iPhone-based cousin, with judicious use of the stylus of course.

The main gameplay mode is enough to keep players busy defending from wave after wave of enemies, and this itself comes with three difficulty levels. I managed to pass the Easy mode without breaking a sweat but I’ve yet to face the horrors Medium and Hard have to offer.

Complementing this are the Challenge and Fun modes. Fancy facing 100 waves of creeps or creeps spawning every second? These modes can fulfil your sado-masochistic Tower Defense tendencies and then some. It’s a shame though the game doesn’t come with a scenario builder, it would have been more fun, especially if you can trade scenarios with a friend.

As mentioned earlier, the game comes with a bitmap editor. You can use this to change how your towers and creeps look like. Again, the lack of connectivity and sharing options are a little bit disappointing, as there is plenty of potential from this.

In any case, Tower Defense is finally here as a piece of commercial software for the Nintendo DS, and far superior to that of the homebrew game known as Warcraft: Tower Defense. Desktop Tower Defense is available starting May 18th. Interested? Click here to order.

Going on holiday is a pretty good excuse to catch up on video gaming. In my case, I actually managed to finish a Nintendo DS game in less than 24 hours.

Adapted from a movie which was in turn adapted from a Neil Gaiman fantasy horror story (he of The Sandman and Stardust fame) of the same name, Coraline is an adventure game with a mixed bag of tricks in the form of mini games and at times it is guilty of being tedious and convulated.

The premise however is pretty interesting (read the book or watch the movie if you have the time), with Coraline and her family moving into a house with pretty strange tenants in the attic and the basement. Stranger still is a door to an “Other World”.

This “Other World” mirrors the one where Coraline lives in but the inhabitants, including her “Other Mum” and “Other Dad”, seem to treat her better than her real parents. Like a good horror story, there’s more than meets the eye (pun intended, look out for them button-eyes), but I won’t spoil it for you.

As an adventure game, Coraline does look pretty good on the Nintendo DS, as everything is in 3D. It’s downright gorgeous during the “Other World” segments, particularly in the final chapter of the game.

The mini games however are a different kettle of fish. With the variety of mini games available, there’s practically something for everyone if the execution had not been half-baked in the first place. You have the poor clone of EBA mini-game as well as a horizontal boss chase (and a vertical one as well) and a couple of whack-a-mole type of games. While most of the mini games have in-game instructions, you’ll have to second-guess the game for some of them.

Inteprid players will find that back-tracking and revisting rooms within the house as well the limited number of outdoor locations to be the order of the day, lesser gamers will probably get put off by this as the reward doesn’t really justify the means. As for me, I stuck on for the story, which is one of the better ones that I’ve seen on the DS so far the flawed gameplay wasn’t enough to deter me.

Coraline is now available at a bargain bin price of USD 24.90. Click here for further details.

A couple of days ago, my dog suffered the indignation of a cat stealing her dog food from right under her nose (well, she was barking at strangers walking pass the gate and didn’t realise the cat snuck in). The proper net-speak would be….pwned.

In any case, the whole incident reminded me of the first game I’ve ever played on the PC, Alley Cat. The game was pretty simple, guide the cat to catch some mice while avoiding the big bad dog. A little bit of digging brought up the fact that the game was also released on the Atari 8-bit platform which encompasses the Atari 400 and 800.

Knowing that the Nintendo DS has an Atari 800XL emulator in the form of PokeyDS, I thought it would be fun to hunt down the Alley Cat XEX file and try running it on the DS. Want to know whether it worked? Check out the following video shot in HD (960 * 720):

Some online deals can be too good to be true. A new eBay user with no prior auction record, selling brand new games at really low starting prices and to sweeten the deal, he offers free shipping to anywhere. Too good to be true? Yup, it sounds like someone is trying to offload a whole bunch of pirated NDS games on eBay.

Check out the following screenshot of the person’s auction listing. I’ll bet he’ll just disappear after the auctions have ended and pop up somewhere else with a new eBay username to continue selling the crap.

I can’t help but feel a little dumb playing Gardening Mama on the NDS. But before anyone of you Cooking Mama fans start throwing brickbats, hear me out would you?

The thing about living in a Semi-D house is that it accords you a decent amount of land to start a garden and to plant stuff, which I actually did. I derived great pleasure from planting some cucumber and sawi (Chinese mustard greens) seeds and watching them plants grow and then eating them as well.

Now, back to Gardening Mama. The very idea of transplanting all the chores/tasks involved in gardening to the touch screen felt nothing short of stupid. Planting and tending to even a potted plant is more interesting compared to seeing a virtual plant on screen. You can’t do anything with it, can you?

Madness aside, I’m still pretty sure that there are people that would actually buy this game (which is actually a crazier notion compared to playing the game), so if you are interested, click here for details. Now, if you may excuse me, I’ve got a real garden to tend to.

At the risk of making this week sound like bargains galore at Nine Over Ten 9/10 (which is not a bad idea actually), I’ll put this up but at the same time promise that regular news, reviews, commentaries and even videos will be coming up next.

Nintendo DS fans rejoice, particularly those from the imports crowd as Namco Bandai’s Tales of Hearts (CG Movie Edition) is now selling at a bargain bin price of just USD 19.90, down from its original price of USD 62.90.

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier is probably one of the more fun RPGs that I’ve played lately on the Nintendo DS. At first I thought the game was a tactical RPG featuring Gundam-like mecha but it turns out that Endless Frontier is an offshoot of the original Super Robot Taisen series and instead has more in common with traditional character driven RPGs like Final Fantasy III.

While the game brought along the bad stuff that I normally associate with traditional RPGs (level grinding, random encounters), it has, to its credit, a lot of anime “fan-service”, an appropriate (but not kid-friendly) script to go along with it and more importantly, a kick-ass combat system.

There’s a reason why the game is given a T rating along with warnings for partial nudity and suggestive themes. The use of jiggly boobs and innuendo abound in this game, so tell your kids that while Mario Kart is theirs for the playing, Endless Frontier is “Daddy’s game”.

Like Final Fantasy III, the combat system is turned based, but it gives you the opportunity to perform “continuous attacks” with more than one of your team members. Continue to lay on the beat down on your opponents and you’ll soon get to unleash a special attack (cue jiggly boobs) to decimate your opponent.

I haven’t have that much fun since the baby-tossing days of Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, and it’s really good that Atlus has brought this over States-side. Like some recent Atlus releases, the game comes as a premium release with the addition of the soundtrack CD. Click here for purchase information.

Now if you must excuse me, I’ve to get all this innuendo outta my head. Remember, the game is not for kids, and neither is Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time. Wouldn’t want impressionable kids tossing babies around, would you?

Sometimes it’s pretty hard to comprehend why developers continue to churn out subpar games after subpar games that do not even measure to half of the better games in a certain genre. It is as if the publisher had a “me-too!” brainwave and while this can be good if they provided quality games in the first place, truth is these are shovelware.

Take for instance World Championship Games: A Track & Field Event for the Nintendo DS which will have you competing in several sporting events, utilizing the touch screen. While this might sound like the awesome New International Track & Field released for the same platform, the former really pales in comparison.

Usage of the touchscreen is pretty Ouendan especially for the running and jumping events. You have to tap on circles with each foot step and nothing gets boring faster than that. The rest of the events feature equally clunky controls (but not as boring), and one couldn’t help but wonder why the developers didn’t put in more graphical cues like the ones you can find in New International Track & Field.

But judging by the graphic quality of World Championship Games, one shouldn’t expect much. The game is downright ugly. The character textures look like something from the Quake era, and while that might be a compliment 10 years ago (no offense id Software!), looking like vormit in this day and age is just plain revolting.

The only event I had fun in was archery. While the other events will have you busy focusing on the touch screen with no time to watch the action unfold on the top screen, archery has that cool follow the arrow cam after you have launch the shot. Hitting the bullseye and getting 10 points, it’s just sheer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, that’s the only bright spot in this dismal outing for the Nintendo DS. So if you are buying this for your kid, it’s uglier than Pokemon and plays worse (most of the time). There are better and cheaper games out there, and the first thing you should do is to check out Konami’s New International Track & Field which sells for just USD 14.90 (click here for details).

If you are still interest in World Championship Games, it is available now. Click here for details.

This is pretty interesting, Juushinden: Ultimate Beast Battlers, a collectible card game for the Nintendo DS (it comes with a card reader as well) is back in the bargain bin at Play-Asia. Price tag? USD 19.90, down from the original price of USD 64.90. Click here for details.

If you are looking for booster packs, Play-Asia has them as well. The Volume 3 Booster Packs are selling at a discounted price of USD 1.29. Click here for details.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine for the Nintendo DS (NDS) is pretty messed up, much like its namesake character. But unlike the appealing messiness of Wolverine’s convulated history, the video game feels like a mishmash of ideas thrown into a pot, hoping that it would go down well with gamers.

The first level kick starts with you playing as Wolverine, laying the beatdown on his brother (at least in the movie, whoops…spoiler!) Sabretooth. I can’t remember the last game I played which featured a boss-fight at the very beginning, but this doesn’t really do the game any justice as you have no idea why are you fighting him in the first place.

This then skips to the Weapon X facility to the part where Wolverine was getting his adamantium manicure, I mean adamantium bonding done. Unlike the movie, the game developers chose to have Wolverine wear the head piece featured in Chris Claremont’s Weapon X comic series.

Conflicting source material aside, it is here that you’ll get the gist of the game. It is basically a 2D brawler, an updated Streets of Rage with metal claws and a really crazy touch screen-based beserker mode. Fights can be frenetic but you’ll be let down with jerky animations and the fact that Wolverine has to resort to jumping around like a hyper active dog to tackle multiple enemies makes it feel like Mario with claws.

The NDS version of the game feels uninspired, sharing the knack of letting down fans as the recently released film which on its own would seem like the writers went to town with the source material and came back with a watered-down, Teen-friendly and untimately un-Wolverine-like cinematic experience.

But if you are really interested in the game, click here to check ou the various console versions available.